When we surveyed hairdressers earlier this year to establish benchmarks regarding the way hair pros view their own health, one statistic jumped out at us—in a good way! When asked whether they smoke, 85% of survey participants responded “no”! That is very good news for the salon community.

That encouraging 85% figure came up a second time in our survey as well—representing the total percentage of respondents who said they either were happy with their current health or they are making changes to get healthier. Broken down, 30.5% of respondents indicated that they were happy with their current health, while 54.3% said that they would like to be healthier and were making changes to improve their health. Almost all of the remaining responses indicated that the respondents planned to make changes in the future to improve their health; fewer than 1% of respondents said they would like to be healthier but do not plan to make any changes.

Also in the good news department, some health issues that we speculated might be impacting hairdressers did not come up in the research as particularly worrisome for these respondents. Ailments currently affecting 10% or fewer of our respondents were: cancer (2.2%); diabetes (4.1%); heart disease and blood pressure issues (7.8%); and mental and emotional problems, including eating disorders, depression and substance abuse (10%).

Check next week’s Healthy Hairdresser eletter for the other side of the survey—the health issues that have a majority of hairdresser respondents concerned.

Read the article in the City of Hope Journal summarizing the Healthy Hairdresser Survey.